Wisdom #2
She knows he was gentle, and that when he left her where she lay, he left a storm cradled in her womb, where it sparks and stretches still, wind and rain and lightning all growing together, bound in flesh and silence.
She will be a mother, and all because a storm took pity on her and came down from the heavens to claim her as his own. She will no longer be alone.
All she has to do is wait.
The second day of July is wading through the golden hours of morning, and Elisabet labors in her agonies on that same bed, holding tight to the ropes which bind her wrists and keep her from keeling forward, unable to find another ounce of fight in her fragile skin.
The midwife is a stranger to their village.
She rode in three nights prior with a caravan of traveling folk, and while her hands are gentle, her voice is strange, thick with an accent Elisabet doesn’t know.
Not that she’s been listening to the woman’s voice much for the last fistful of hours. She pushes when she’s told to push, she breathes when she’s told to breathe, and she screams when she’s not told to do anything at all. She knows something is wrong.
Then, without warning, the woman is at the head of the bed, her mouth near Elisabet’s ear.
“We told him, when he found and fancied you, we told him your body was not as strong as it would need to be to survive the cost of his attention. We told him you would not survive. But he has never been one to listen to those he considers less than his equals, and he took you for his lover all the same.”
“My … storm,” gasps Elisabet, catching the midwife’s meaning. “Not … sorry.”
“Ah, good. That is better, then, if only by a small degree: it means you may not regret the price you pay.” The woman leans closer still, her dark eyes fixed on Elisabet’s. “The labor does not go well. You know that, yes?”
Elisabet is no fool. She’s known for hours now that things are not proceeding as they should, that her child is not to have an easy entrance to the world. She nods, saving her breath for another scream.
“I came at your lover’s request, because those who labor are my domain; it is my duty to do for you what little I can. But at this stage, what I can do is very little. I can save one of you. Both is beyond me.”
Elisabet gasps, struggling to breathe, fighting to understand. “Which one?”
And the stranger smiles, sorrowful as a Sunday, and inclines her head, dark hair falling around her features like a mourner’s veil at a funeral. “That, my little love, is for you to decide.”
Elisabet gasps again as she understands the choice before her, the offer that has been made. “Why?”
“That question could have a thousand meanings, and we don’t have a thousand years.
Why did he choose you? Because he could.
Because he knows our time is over, fading into antiquity and shadow, and when he finds the strength to appear before a comely maid, he feels compelled to do so.
Why did he leave you with child? Because such encounters will always birth new life.
Why should you choose to live? You are young, Elisabet Turner, and the world is wide.
You could have a marvelous future, and leave this place so far behind you that it echoes only in the deepest of your dreams. You could be happy.
I know that doesn’t sound real right now, but I swear on my mother’s name, you could be happy.
You could shine like a star, if you chose to live. ”
Elisabet is past speaking now, her throat stopped with pain, her breath committed to moving sharply in and out as she struggles to keep living. Still, her eyes plead with the stranger, who sighs and nods.
“Why should you choose to let your infant daughter survive in your stead? Because you have always wished to be a mother, and if you choose her, you will die knowing that your dream came true. Because she will be exceptional, bright and brilliant and blazing. Children of storms always are. She will change the world, Elisabet. Not in the same ways you would, but in ways that it will never forget.” She pauses, then adds the words that she knows will seal Elisabet Turner’s fate: “She will be remembered.”
Elisabet nods fiercely, and manages her final word, a question: “Name?”
And the stranger, who could interpret that word in two directions, chooses the easier answer.
She has been speaking hard and terrible truths since her arrival, even if she can’t control how Elisabet will hear them: this time, this last time, she will speak the softer truth, the one which changes nothing at all.
“Ilithyia,” she says, and moves back to the foot of the bed, resuming her position.
Elisabet’s labor, which began upon the stroke of midnight, ends at the stroke of noon the following day, taking her life with it into nothingness after twelve hours of agony.
Her daughter, newly born and still wet with blood and amniotic fluids, wails her existence into the air as Ilithyia extracts the placenta from Elisabet’s cooling body and separates the infant from the organ which sustained her until this moment.
In other villages, at other bedsides, she might hurry, might even flee at this stage, aware that someone will be coming to point a finger and seek someone to blame.
Here, now, she attends to the body of a woman barely shy of accusations of witchcraft, misliked and likely to go unmourned by her neighbors.
The only question is the baby. She can leave her here, count on these people to do the right thing by the girl, or she can claim to have lost them both and vanish into the wilds with the child swaddled in her own arms.
There is temptation in the thought of taking the child as her own.
The girl has as yet done nothing wrong, has had no opportunity to grow into anything more than a squalling infant, made entirely of possibility and unspent potential.
Ilithyia told only the truth when she said Elisabet’s daughter would change the world, that she will be remembered: she has never once lied to a mother in childbed, and she won’t allow this girl to change that fundamental part of her.
The girl will change the world. But if Ilithyia takes her now, that change will be kinder, will claim fewer lives.
So much hinges on this choice. She reaches for the child, is on the verge of lifting her from the mattress when someone hammers on the door, and the voice of the village priest calls, “Elisabet? I heard the silence. Are you well?”
Ilithyia looks over her shoulder in surprise, and when she looks back to the child, the future where Ilithyia took her is gone, replaced by a single shining road of iridescence and impossibility stretching into the unvarying future.
“Very well, then,” she says, and swaddles the baby with quick, well-practiced motions, lifting her and carrying her to the door, which she opens easily.
The priest looks at her with wary grief.
He knows, already, in some terrible way.
He knows, and she knows the village will take his acceptance of the dead woman’s child as proof that he broke his vows.
He’ll raise her for seven years, then send her to her uncle’s in a vain attempt to restore his honor. It won’t work. It never does.
“I was unable to save the mother,” says Ilithyia, and hands him the girl, who quiets at once when he pulls her to his chest. She stares at him with her unfocused eyes, and he stares back. Ilithyia wonders how much of his future he sees in that child’s gaze, and whether it changes anything.
She rather thinks it doesn’t.
She walks away, and no one stops her. No one ever does. The afternoon is young, and she has very far to go to make it back home to Olympus.